Update on the Kagi / Visual Hub Story with Response form Kagi’s CEO and Tyler Loch, Visual Hub Author

You can see my original post on the Kagi / VisualHub saga here: here.

I’m running out to a meeting but wanted to get a quick update in.

Kagi CEO Kee Nethery reached out to me via telephone a few minutes ago. Kagi was the payment processor for Visualhub when it was being sold as a product. Kagi processes payments and distributes serial registration codes that would unlock the software for unlimited use.

Nethery said sales of Visualhub were in the ‘thousands’ before author Tyler Loch decided to shut the product down in 2008. When OS X Lion came out Visualhub stopped working and many remaining users of Visualhub contacted Kagi for help. Kagi often answers simple questions that users ask of the payment processor even though the individual software developer is ultimately responsible for maintaining their product.

“What we initially did was forwarded people over to Tyler’s update page that has three applescripts [posted],” Nethery said, “Personally I don’t find that to be a problem. Most of the people we deal with did have a problem and it’s way past their comfort level.”

In the case of Visualhub, Nethery said they had a “support nightmare” as some users had difficulty installing the update that required digging into the Visualhub application file.

Nethery said the company took the unprecedented step of issuing the $4.99 updater to automate the process. It takes the three scripts that Loch provided on his website and automatically backs up and modifies the Visualhub application, leaving a new patched application called “Visualhub Lion” that works with the new Apple operating system. It also includes an additional update Loch made available to the underlying video processing engine that powers the product.

Kagi has not updated a product before, as Nethery says these kinds of functionality patches are “trivial” for someone who is maintaining an active product. Nethery expressed some frustration that Loch walked away from a product that was selling well and was quite popular in its day (and still is).

“We’ve never had someone walk away from a business before,” he said.

In a statement, Loch says that he did not authorize Kagi to issue the patch.

We used Kagi as our official reseller for all Techspansion sales. We had a good working relationship for the years Techspansion was active.

Although VisualHub had not been offered for sale in years I thought it would be a nice gesture to fix some issues that caused it to fail on Mac OS X Lion.
I quietly released some replacement components for free on techspansion.com a month ago for people who still used VisualHub and AudialHub.

Last night, a former customer e-mailed me very confused. He had received an e-mail from Kagi about a Lion updater for VisualHub. For $4.99.

Then my father-in-law calls, asking if I’m going back in business, and just forgotten to mention it to him…

More and more friends, family and former customers began to contact my wife and I last night, wondering what’s going on.

We began to realize that our entire customer base (or close to it) had been contacted with an advertisement for the $5 “vHub Updater”, something I’ve never been involved with, which touts our software’s name and company name — front and center.

Though FFmpeg and the inner workings of my programs are open-source (FilmRedux, ReduxZero, etc), VisualHub as it exists in the world, is not. I gave no permission and had no prior knowledge of Kagi hosting, redistributing, and indirectly selling the components I wrote in their product.

And I definitely did not (and would never) use the contact info of my company’s customers to solicit business like this.

So, here’s the gist of it:

A former trusted business partner appropriates my copyrighted code…

…Packages it up and makes it available through an updater…

…Offers it up for sale…

…And mass-mails my customers about it.

Loch said he’s in touch with Kagi now to try and resolve the situation.